The South’s New Lost Cause

Before he was immortalized for saving the union, freeing the slaves and
giving the best political speech in American history, Abraham Lincoln
was just an unpopular new president handed a colossal crisis. Elected
with 39.7 percent of the vote, Lincoln told a big lie in his inaugural
address of 1861.

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the
institution of slavery in the states where it exists,” he said, reaching
out to the breakaway South. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so,
and I have no inclination to do so.”...

The comparisons of President Obama to Lincoln fade with every day of the
shrinking modern presidency. As for the broken-promise scale: Lincoln
said an entire section of the country could continue to enslave more
than one in three of its people. Obama wrongly assured about five
million people that they could keep their bare-bones health plans if
they liked them (later amended when it turned not to be true).

As inapt as those comparisons are, what is distressingly similar today
is how the South is once again committed to taking a backward path. By
refusing to expand health care for the working poor through Medicaid,
which is paid for by the federal government under Obamacare, most of the
old Confederacy is committed to keeping millions of its own fellow
citizens in poverty and poor health. They are dooming themselves,
further, as the Left-Behind States....